條碼之動態性應用評估: 以急診胸痛臨床路徑管理為例

Barcode has been a very simple, popular and economic tool for data entry and identification. It also has been widely used in medical care to assure patient safety. Since all of the labels on the barcode have kept unchanged once they were created in most of the current applications, the value of barcode might be underestimated. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of the dynamic use of barcode for the clinical pathway management of the chest pain patients in the Emergency Department of a teaching medical center in Taipei. The system was client-server based and programmed in Visual Basic. Net. The 39-code barcode was used for the study and designed using the Microsoft BarcodeX component. The Microsoft SQL Server was chosen for the database. The Epson Photo 925 color printer was used to generate the barcode labels. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was used to evaluate the acceptability of systems by the emergency nurses. Barcode label carried three pieces of information patient ID, clinical pathway status, and acuity level which was represented by the color of label. The system was composed of six functions: New Patient, Clinical Pathway Design, Barcode Generating Wizard, Patient Data, Pathway Monitoring, and Administration. Barcode label could be easily generated automatically or manually and then pasted to the chart during the care process to display the most updated information of caring. The results showed the positive technical feasibility of the dynamic use of barcodes for patient care in terms of easiness, information- rich identification, process reminding, and simple but important patient data entry. This practice might be a good alternative to the 'Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)' technique in medical care. However, we still need to further examine the practical factors such as applied environments, barcode limitations, and patient preferences to assure its implementation feasibility.